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False Advertising for 5G

As has been expected, the wireless carriers are now actively marketing 5G cellular even though there are no actual 5G deployments. The marketing folks are always far in front of the engineers and are proclaiming 5G today much in the same way that they proclaimed 4G long before it was available.

The 5G Evolution product doesn’t contain any part of the new 5G standards. Instead, 5G Evolution is AT&T’s deployment of 4G LTE-Advanced technology, which can be characterized as their first fully-compliant 4G product. This is a significant upgrade that they should be proud of, but I guess their marketing folks would rather call this an evolutionary step towards 5G rather than admit that they are finally bringing mature 4G to the market – a claim they’ve already been making for many years.

What I find most annoying about AT&T’s announcement is the claim that 5G Evolution will “enable peak theoretical wireless speeds for capable devices of at least 400 megabits per second”, although their footnote goes on to say that “actual speeds are lower and will vary”. The 4G standard has been theoretically capable of speeds of at least 300 Mbps in a lab setting since the standard was first announced – but that theoretical speed has no relevance to today’s 4G network that generally delivers an average 4G speed of less than 15 Mbps.

This is like having a fiber-to-the-home provider advertise that their product is capable of speeds of 159 terabits per second, although actual speeds might be something less (that’s the current fastest speed achieved on fiber by scientists at the NICT Network System Research Institute in Japan). The intent of the statement on the AT&T website is clearly aimed at making people think they will soon be getting blazingly fast cellular data – which is not true. This is the kind of false advertising that is overstating the case for 5G (and in this case for 4G) that is confusing the public, politicians and regulators. You can’t really blame policy-makers for thinking that wireless will soon be the only technology we will need when the biggest wireless provider shamelessly claims speeds far in excess of what they will be ever be deploying.

AT&T’s second claim of launching standards-based mobile 5G in 19 markets is a little closer to the truth, but is still not 5G cellular. That service is going to deploy millimeter spectrum hotspots (a technology that is being referred to as Mi-Fi) in selected locations in 19 cities including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, etc.

These will be true hotspots, similar to what we see in Starbucks, meaning that users will have to be in the immediate vicinity of a hotspot to get the faster service. Millimeter wave hotspots have an even shorter propagation distance than normal WiFi hotspots and the signal will travel for a few hundred feet, at best. The hotspot data won’t roam and will only work for a user while they stay in range of a given hot spot.

AT&T hasn’t said where this will be deployed, but I have to imagine it will be in places like big business hotels, convention centers and indoor sports arenas. The deployment serves several purposes for AT&T. In those busy locations it will provide an alternate source of broadband for AT&T customers who have a phone capable of receiving the Mi-Fi signal. This will relieve the pressure on normal cellular data locally, while also providing a wow factor for AT&T customers that get the faster broadband.

However, again, AT&T’s advertising is deceptive. Their press releases make it sound like the general public in these cities will soon have much faster cellular data, and they will not. Those with the right phone that find themselves in one of the selected venues will see the faster speeds, but this technology will not be deployed to the wider market in these cities. Millimeter wave hotspots are an indoor technology and not of much practical use outside. The travel distances are so short that a millimeter wave hot spot loses a significant percentage of its strength in the short distance from a pole to the ground.

I can’t really blame the marketing folks at AT&T for touting imaginary 5G. It’s what’s hot in the marketplace today and what the public has been primed to expect. But just like the false hype when 4G was first introduced, cellular customers are not on the verge of seeing blazingly fast cellphone service in the places they live and work. This advertising seems to be intended to boost the AT&T brand, but it also might be defensive since other cellular carriers are making similar claims.

Unfortunately, this kind of false advertising plants the notion for politicians and policy-makers that cellular broadband will soon be all we will need. That’s an interesting corporate tactic to take by AT&T which is also building more fiber-to-the-premise right now than anybody else. These false claims seems to be most strongly competing with their own fiber broadband. But as I’ve always said, AT&T wears many hats and I imagine that their own fiber folks are as annoyed by this false advertising as the rest of us in the industry.